Part 2: The Rivers that Run Through It: A liquid landfill chokes the city

Drivers and passersby usually smell the Lou Romano water reclamation plant before they see it.

Cool, windy days waft the stench down the Ojibway Parkway, but when Windsor’s trademark summer humidity rises, the air surrounding the plant is putrid with the scent of dirty water and the sludge the plant purges from it.

The sprawling facility processes up to 700 million litres of sewage per day, draining two-thirds of the city’s water use back into the Detroit River after being filtered of garbage and grit and treated for contaminants. But despite the plant’s colossal impact on Windsor’s main watershed, plant manager Tony Bietola says most residents have no idea what happens to the water they flush from their own homes – and their ignorance comes at a cost.

The collective waste drained from hundreds of thousands of Windsor properties each day chokes the treatment plant with a rancid array of disposable wipes, hair clumps, used tampons and cigarette butts. Bietola says the more undissolvable litter residents throw down their drains, the more likely the facility’s machinery is to break.

Water is put through a biological aeration filtration system at the Lou Roman Water Reclamation Plant to destroy bacteria, Wednesday, June 19, 2014. Urban areas put pressure on the natural watersheds and treatment plants help to offset the effects. (RICK DAWES/The Windsor Star)

It wouldn’t be the first time damaged or aging equipment has triggered mass releases of contaminants into Windsor’s waterways. In 2012, the Lou Romano plant reported one incident where the treated water contained enough E. coli to exceed the Ministry of Environment’s limit by more than twice the acceptable monthly average.

“Everybody’s quite surprised at the impact that items like wipes and sanitary napkins and fruit stickers and other debris has on this end of the process,” Bietola says. “Based on that alone, I don’t think a lot of people are aware of the impact they have on our process.

“There was no thought given to how to handle or process these types of items.”

The plant costs more than $11 million to run each year, and saw a $110-million expansion in 2007 — barely enough to stem the tide of waste contained in the massive volumes of water pumped through every day, which still pose problems when the city’s combined waste water and storm water sewers overflow in heavy rain.

Plant manager Tony Bietola talks about how water makes its way through Windsor’s sewers, during a tour of the Lou Roman Water Reclamation plant, Thursday, June 19, 2014. (RICK DAWES/The Windsor Star)

Bietola says if the water flowing through Windsor’s watersheds is like blood pumping through the Windsor-Essex region, the Lou Romano plant is the liver filtering out waste and debris before the water runs back into the Detroit River. And like a vital organ, the facility can’t withstand decades of abuse.

Torrents of combined storm water and waste water are carried to the Lou Romano plant for treatment on rainy days, thanks to Windsor’s partially outdated sewer system, which still contains 228 kilometres of pre-1950s combined sewers.

In 2011, Windsor completed work on a massive riverfront water retention basin, designed to hold combined sewer overflow until the Lou Romano plant has the capacity to treat it. But Fahd Mikael, engineer III for the city, says the basin isn’t a complete solution. Windsor’s aging combined sewers must still be replaced with separated storm and sanitary sewers to reduce the amount of water the Lou Romano plant needs to treat, but it will take time and money.

“The city’s working, definitely. Wherever we have combined sewers we try to remove them … but we have a limited amount of money coming in every year,” he says.

“Every year, we try to hit as many as we can with the money available.”

This corridor is know as the “pipe gallery” and sits below the Lou Romano Water Reclamation Plant, taken Thursday, June 19, 2014. The plant provides treatment for up to 700 million litres of sewege a day. (RICK DAWES/The Windsor Star)

Claire Sanders, co-ordinator for the Detroit River Canadian Cleanup, says Windsor residents need to look at the situation from an ecological perspective – the urban impact residents have on the city’s main watershed is immense and clouded with a long history of pollution. If the city and its residents don’t act now to improve sewer systems and water quality, they’ll pay for it decades later.

“People just don’t necessarily connect in their heads, ‘What goes down my drain on Ouellette Avenue eventually goes into the river.’ Where else is it going to go?” Sanders says.

“We’re starting to understand what impact we do have on the river, but it takes a long time. Impacts that we had 60, 70 years ago — we’re still paying for some of those mistakes when we didn’t know.”

Sanders can only hope the consequences of residents’ current habits will have ebbed in another 60 years. Non-point source pollution makes it impossible to lay blame on a single cause, but every non-biodegradable detergent washed off a driveway, and every downspout flushing rainwater into a sewer makes a difference.

“It comes down to watching what you’re putting in the drain and taking that extra few minutes to dispose of chemicals properly,” she says.

A sign at the Lou Romano Water Reclamation Plant is pictured here, along Ojibway Parkway, Wednesday, July 16, 2014. The plant processes up to 700 million litres of sewage per day. (RICK DAWES/The Windsor Star)

Polymers are added to water at the Lou Roman Water Reclamation plant in order to extract phosphorus and suspended solids, Thursday, June 19, 2014. Urban areas put pressure on natural watersheds and treatment plants help to offset the effects. (RICK DAWES/The Windsor Star)

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I don’t know about impossible, but given that it’s taken almost 20 years to churn out five instalments of this series – something the early Bond franchise managed in six years, and the 1960s M:I TV show in just six weeks – these missions are certainly a lot of work